This invention relates to the field of computing and, in particular, to methods, computer program products, and apparatuses for modeling, monitoring, and managing system dimensions for a service assurance system in a telecommunications environment.
Changing one or more dimensions of a service assurance system can be an extremely costly and time-consuming exercise. Although the same software may be included in a plurality of service assurance systems, each time a service assurance system is sold, problems arise in terms of determining one or more dimensions of a system solution. Illustratively, these dimensions may specify one or more of a number or quantity of CPUs, a type of CPU, a database size, or a memory size. There is an even more difficult problem of continually monitoring the dimensions of a running system so as to ensure that the assumptions and rules of the original model for the system solution are correct. Changes to the model and dimensions may be required if some of the original assumptions are invalid, or if the model changes. The model may change if, for example, new data sources are added or additional customers use a communications network. It may also change as new services are supported or if the size of the actual network itself increases, e.g., an increased number of network elements.
The dimensions of the solution depend on a number of variables which are particular to a telecommunications service assurance system. These variables include, but are not limited, to: (i) number and complexity of data sources, (ii) number and complexity of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Key Quality Indicators (KQIs) and Combined KQIs, (iii) data summarization policies, (iv) length of time to be stored, (v) number and complexity of reports to be generated from the data, (vi) number and complexity of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to be supported, and so on.
At present, there are a handful of in-house, deployment-specific tools for managing system dimensions, but no techniques currently exist that are generic and applicable to a variety of different settings. More specifically, these existing tools are not applicable to a variety of different settings because they do not model variables in a solution-neutral manner that is independent of actual data sources. Moreover, these existing tools do not function by monitoring or comparing a model against an equivalent running system to update the system solution where necessary to reflect a changing reality.